About
P.A. Skantze has been teaching across the disciplines of theatre
history, theatre practice, writing and performance since her
postgraduate experience at Columbia University. Her method has always
been one of engaged translation between practice, practitioners and
theorists influenced by her traditional training in an English
department that required study from 1600 to contemporary performance,
from Dante to Angela Carter. Setting the history of print and sound in
the early modern period against current conversations about the live and
the virtual, she has explored the characteristics of stillness and
motion throughout the forms and practices of performances: Shakespeare,
dance, European drama in translation, sound art and radio, adaptation
and the performance score.
Her book Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century (Routledge
2003) is the first installment in this transnational, transmedial,
transtemporal exploration.
Her articles include examinations of
national identity, the choreography of Bill T. Jones, surtitles and
contemporary theatrical performance, gift exchange and creative
generosity, Shakespeare and Mabou Mines, gender and motion. She has done
workshops in the UK, the US and Italy. Her radio play All That Fell
was staged, an “experiment in physical radio, in May 2006 and is being
recorded in 2008 in New York. Currently her performance projects
include: KusseBisse, a butoh version of Kleist’s Penthesilea for which
she wrote the libretto scheduled to be staged in London in early 2009
[see youtube link on this page]; Cassandra Float Can, performance based
on a text by Anne Carson, London 2008/9; and “Stacks” a musical in
homage to the New York Public Library with a heroine who saves New York
by entering five famous books about the city and retrieving the
necessary elements for New York’s survival
She has supervised and
examined dissertations about the ‘stage life of props,’ voice and gender
in early modern theatre, dreams and dreaming on stage from Calderon to
Strindberg, female masochism in film and performance art, practice as
research project on a queer method for playwriting,
documentation-lies-videotape.
She welcomes projects that are practice based, theoretical and/or a
mix of both on: early modern practice; the history of sound and sound in
performance; transnational identities; new and old and east and west
European drama; reception and cognition; questions of spectating;
writing for performance; dance; the gender making performance and in the
making of performance; gift theory and inventive methods of scholarly
circulation; stillness and motion and performance; creating flexible
modes of academic exploration of performance, historical and
contemporary.